Friday, 5 June 2015

"The Cable News Network (CNN) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel that is owned by the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner. The 24-hour cable news channel was founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage, and was the first all-news television channel in the United States. While the news channel has numerous affiliates, CNN primarily broadcasts from the Time Warner Center in New York City, and studios in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, its headquarters at the CNN Center in Atlanta is only used for weekend programming. CNN is sometimes referred to as CNN/U.S. to distinguish the American channel from its international sister network, CNN International. As of August 2010, CNN is available in over 100 million U.S. households. Broadcast coverage of the U.S. channel extends to over 890,000 American hotel rooms, as well as carriage on cable and satellite providers throughout Canada. Globally, CNN programming airs through CNN International, which can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories. As of February 2015, CNN is available to approximately 96,289,000 cable, satellite and, telco television households (82.7% of households with at least one television set) in the United States." (Wikipedia)

CNN has a cyber security bug problem. It cab be exploited by XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Open Redirect (Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards) attacks.

Based on news published, CNN users were hacked based on both Open Redirect and XSS vulnerabilities.According to E Hacker News on June 06, 2013, (@BreakTheSec) came across a diet spam campaign that leverages the open redirect vulnerability in one of the top News organization CNN.After the attack, CNN takes measures to detect Open Redirect vulnerabilities. The measure is quite good during the tests. Almost no links are vulnerable to Open Redirect attack on CNN's website, now. It takes long time to find a new Open Redirect vulnerability that is un-patched on its website.

CNN.com was hacked by Open Redirect in 2013. While the XSS attacks happened in 2007.

<1> "The tweet apparently shows cyber criminals managed to leverage the open redirect security flaw in the CNN to redirect twitter users to the Diet spam websites."

Figure from ehackingnews.com

At the same time, the cybercriminals have also leveraged a similar vulnerability in a Yahoo domain to trick users into thinking that the links point to a trusted website.

XSS may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user's browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server. Base on Acunetix, exploited XSS is commonly used to achieve the following malicious results

Identity theft

Accessing sensitive or restricted information

Gaining free access to otherwise paid for content

Spying on user’s web browsing habits

Altering browser functionality

Public defamation of an individual or corporation

Web application defacement

Denial of Service attacks

The code programming flaw can be exploited without user login. Tests were performed on Firefox (34.0) in Ubuntu (14.04) and IE (9.0.15) in Windows 7.

From OWASP, an open redirect is an application that takes a parameter and redirects a user to the parameter value without any validation. This vulnerability is used in phishing attacks to get users to visit malicious sites without realizing it. This could allow a user to create a specially crafted URL, that if clicked, would redirect a victim from the intended legitimate web site to an arbitrary web site of the attacker's choosing. Such attacks are useful as the crafted URL initially appear to be a web page of a trusted site. This could be leveraged to direct an unsuspecting user to a web page containing attacks that target client side software such as a web browser or document rendering programs.